Originally Posted by
genejockey
At the time when people were flocking to beaches in Florida, there was no reason to believe it was any safer than congregating indoors. We were only about a month into people paying any attention to the disease at all.
The biggest problem I've seen vis a vis expert advice, the media, and the public is that experts have been playing catchup since last January, the media have been trying to convey hard-and-fast rules from recommendations, and the public are - honestly - too dumb to understand that when you learn new things you change your recommendations based on them. People want hard-and-fast answers, and are unwilling to accept that you don't get them, and so they treat changing recommendations based on new data as "Science keeps changing its mind", or "It's too complicated, so I'm gonna give up and just do whatever I want".
Add to this the media's inability to explain, and the public's to understand, how science actually works, that our job is to come up with our best estimate based on everything we know, and then try to prove that wrong, and if we fail, we STILL don't know that we're right. Most people don't get probability or statistics, hence Las Vegas.
LOL. So much dodging and dancing rather than concede there's a lot Big Science doesn't know.
Get out of your sterile lab, away from your 0s and 1s computer, and see what it's like in the real-world trenches fighting human ailments. We've got mutant strains, witch doctors who can't diagnose diseases, drugs that don't work, people getting their backs lasered--it's chaos out in the streets.